[WikiEN-l] Price we pay from the Deletionists: Y-Combinator looking to fund Wikipedia-like startup

[geni]

2008/7/19 Achille <achille.listserv at gmail.com>:
> The Price we pay from the Deletionists:
> Paul Graham's Y-Combinator is actively looking to fund Wikipedia-like
> startup that does away with them.

Been tried. For various reasons it hasn't worked out so far.

> See: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (Ideas we are looking to sponsor)
>> 23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they're constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.
>

Yes it's called the world wide web.

It's the ah higher end articles that make wikipedia attractive to the
far end of the long tail and without that you are up against facebook
myspace and email spam folders.

The various areas that we don't cover but people are still interested
in writing non advert articles are rapidly getting cleaned up by wikia
and encyclopedia dramatica. On the other hand no one seems to have
really worked out how to build a successful porn wiki yet. Or a
celebrity gossip wiki but I feel that market may already be rather
saturated.

> On that note, why don't we enable access to deleted content ? It's
> already there, we can just dump them nightly into a big file.

Because the deletion database is lousy with copyvios libel and privacy
violations. People from time to time want to save everything but then
discover that everything includes an unreasonable number of "bob is
gay" articles.


-- 
geni